Scientists discover in Antarctica a "foreign" grain of dust that could challenge our understanding of the solar system



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Scientists have discovered a tiny grain of "foreign" dust created by the death of a missing star.

The tiny speck of star dust was found inside a chondritic meteorite in Antarctica, having been projected into space by a star that exploded and died before it. same as our own sun exists.

Small pieces of grain like the new discovery are thought to help create the early mix of materials that helped shape the sun and our planets – and possibly life. But they are rarely seen because it is so hard for them to survive in the chaos of the early solar system.


Scientists are now hoping that the small and lucky grain could offer a glimpse of the conditions that helped shape everything around us.

"As real dust from stars, these presolar grains give us insight into the building blocks from which our solar system was formed," said Pierre Haenecour, lead author of the new document published in Nature. . "They also provide us with a direct snapshot of the conditions a star was in when that grain formed."

The grain has been named LAP-149 and is the only known piece of graphite and silicate grains that scientists can trace back to the particular type of stellar explosion to which it has managed to survive. After being driven out by this eruption, he flew through space and arrived in the region that is now our solar system, finding himself caught in a primitive meteorite.

Novae, like the one who threw the speck of dust, occurs when a binary star system includes the rest of a dying star known as the White War, attached to another star that is a main sequence star or a red giant. As the white dwarf erases, he destroys the substance of his greatest companion. Once it's big enough, it emits new chemical elements, deep in space, to diffuse them across the universe and help diffuse entirely new materials towards others. solar systems.

This process made it possible to draw the universe from the hydrogen, helium and lithium that were present when it began to evolve towards the rich and varied set of elements that surround us today. Without such a dispersion, there would be no life, consisting of the most complex and recent elements disseminated during such violent encounters.

To better understand this process, researchers analyzed the small grain at the atomic level with the aid of a highly developed technology. In doing so, they discovered how foreign it was, by discovering huge amounts of a strange carbon isotope called 13C.

"The isotopic composition of carbon in everything we have ever sampled and coming from any planet or body in our solar system usually varies by a factor of about 50," he said. Haenecour. "The 13C we found in the LAP-149 is enriched more than 50,000 times.

"These results provide further evidence in the laboratory that high-carbon and oxygen-rich novae grains have contributed to the building blocks of our solar system."

The stars that gave birth to the tiny grains of star dust will now be dead long ago. But by studying their composition, scientists can understand their living conditions, write the researchers in the new article.

"Our discovery gives us insight into a process we could never see on Earth," Haenecour added. "He explains to us how the dust grains form and move inside when expelled by the nova.We now know that carbonaceous and silicate dust grains can form in the same nova ejecta and that 39 they are transported through chemically distinct dust piles ejecta, something that has been predicted by novae models but never found in a specimen. "

Scientists are unable to say exactly how old the grain is because it does not contain enough atoms. They hope to find new larger pieces to try to understand how they contributed to the formation of our solar system.

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